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Welcome! Artfully Musing is a blog dedicated to sharing art and the techniques and products used. I'll be showcasing collage, altered and mixed media art as well as miniature. I hope you'll check back often and are inspired. Thanks for visiting! Laura

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Most of my Altoids tin projects only require the container and not the lid. I end up with lots of left over lids which I
hate to throw away. To the rescue is an
easy book project that uses just the lids!

The two lids serve as the front and back
covers for the book inside with a closure made from a ribbon attached to the
lids.

I also added some images to the front of
the frames like the title banners and cards.
You’ll notice that I didn’t use any dimensional embellishments on the
pages as it would make the book too bulky and it wouldn’t fit inside the tins. Just stick with paper images and not too many
of those.

Decide which page you want as the first
and which as the last and cover the backs of these pages with decorative paper.

The end result is 6 unique pages.

PUTTING THE PAGES TOGETHER

Below is the order and method in which I
assembled the pages. Note that the
photos I took were of the book sitting in the tin covers but as you assemble
the pages they are not in the tin.

I glued a hinge to the Alice with Caterpillar
page and then glued the other side of the hinge to the Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum page. Since the Alice with Caterpillar page will be
the first, the back side is covered with decorative paper.

I glued the Alice and Cheshire cat page
to the back of the Tweedle Dee Tweedle Dum page. I glued a hinge to the Cheshire cat
page. I then glued the other side of the
hinge to the Tea Party page.

I glued the Red Queen page to the back
of the Tea Party page. I glued a hinge
to the Red Queen page. I then glued the
other side of the hinge to the Alice and Cards page. Since the Alice and Cards page is the last, the back is covered in decorative paper.

NOTE: Another option is rather than making a hinged
set of pages that fits inside the tin covers, you could simply decorate the
inside of each of the tins as if it were a shadowbox book.

MAKING THE BOOK COVER

I started by wrapping the edges of the
lids with decorative checkered ribbon from my stash. I ran the ribbon through my small Xyron machine
to apply adhesive before attaching it to the lids. I used the Xyron machine as the adhesive won't seep through the ribbon as wet glue would.

Note: After you pull the ribbon through the machine, rub the ribbon with your finger before removing it from the waxy paper dispensed from the machine. This will insure that the adhesive sticks to the ribbon.

With the lids stacked together (insides facing each other), I used
Glossy Accents to attach a ribbon. The
ribbon needs to be long enough to go around both lids and to tie into a bow. I used Glossy Accent because it sticks to
metal. In this case, it doesn’t matter
if the glue seeps through the ribbon as it will be covered with paper.

The last step is to cover the back of
each lid with decorative paper.

In the pictures below, you can see how
the finished ribbon looks on the spine of the book and how the ribbon ties on
the other side of the book.

COVER DÉCOR

This is where you can go crazy with the
dimensional embellishments.

In the background I used more images
from the Alice collage sheets. In the
center is a miniature wood book that I painted and added pages of the Alice in
Wonderland book. At the bottom of this
post are the pages for your use.

This happy scene is built into a box with handles that serve as a tray, making it easy to lift and reposition.

MAKING THE
BASE

The base
is made from an easy to assemble Cottage Base kit which I flipped to make a
tray.

I started
by painting the inside of the tray green (anywhere you think it my show) and
papering the outside of the base.

I then cut
a pieces of Styrofoam to fit the inside of the tray. They are also painted green. The Styrofoam gives me something to insert
the embellishments into.

To jazz
up the outside of the tray, I added pieces of chipboard ivy border painted two
colors of green and door pulls to serve as handles.

THE TREE

The 3D Tree kit consists of 2 pieces. The pieces slip one into the other. I added
glue to the slits before combining the pieces and then wiped away the excess
glue with a damp cloth. This kit comes in three sizes. I used the largest (8") for this project. The tree is one of my favorite parts of the project and a special request of mine to Alpha Stamps. I can see using this in many future projects.

To add fullness to the tree I used a second kit in which I cut each of the pieces in half giving me 4 additional pieces. I glued the cut pieces into each intersection of the main
tree which gives you a you a full
looking tree.

Then, I
painted the tree two colors of green and attached the leaves which I punched
from paper. Alpha Stamps is carrying several different leaf punches. There is
nothing special about the order of assembling first and then painting. You could choose to paint first and then
assemble. If you are going for a winter
or spooky look leave off the leaves.

The last
step was to drape various colored fibers over the branches. I soaked the fibers in water first to
straighten them out, laid them flat to dry and then draped them over the branches. Before mounting the tree in the scene, I added wood blocks to the Styrofoam and then glued the tree to the blocks. This was to give the tree more height and make it look like it was on a small hill. The base of the tree and the wood is covered with the sheet moss and pebbles.

THE TABLE
AND PARTY GOODIES

The base
of the table is made from branches cut from a tree in my yard. Of course I had to pick a tree with what
seemed to be the hardest wood. It’s an
Ironwood tree so I guess its name is accurate.

The lengths
of the pieces don’t have to be exact as I covered the top with sheet moss.

On top of
the table I added some fall oak leaves for contrast. The main item on the table is the scrumptious
cake. The layers of the cake are made
from wood miniature cake kit. I used
pieces from 2 of the kits. I painted the
cake red and drizzled white paint over the cake to serve as icing. I cut out a larger circle of chipboard
(painted brown) to serve as the plate.
Around the edges of the cake are lavender berries, kiwis cut from polymer clay, beads serving as berries and leaves from the rose garland I used
in other parts of the scene. At the top are
roses from the garland and a butterfly.

Berries and
apples are sitting in bowls made from acorn caps. You can see a little hedgehog waiting to dig
in.

The
teacup is made from a tulip bead. The
handle is the stem cut from one of the mushrooms in the scene. The teapot is made from a tulip bead cap with
acorn caps as the base and top. The
handle is made from three stems twisted together. On
the table sits a fairy from the Vintage Postcards Fairies collage sheet which
is the source of all of the fairies in the piece.

BIRD HOUSES
AND CHAIRS

The bird
houses are from chipboard kits that are easy to assemble. I assembled them first, added the paint, moss
on the roofs and leafy chipboard pieces as decoration. Small twigs from my yard served as ledges. The wood the houses sit on is again from the Ironwood tree.